One Deep Breath, Love
by Panny Pancake
Summary: Anthy wanders the world. The garden follows her. [Post-Canon; Hanahaki Disease Trope]


It took some time before Anthy caught on. The sharp, prickling pain in her chest was so familiar that it didn't occur to her until later that it wasn't supposed to be there. She had known life without pain. Once. But it had been too long ago to know where the line was meant to lie.

The cough was a little more unusual – a soft tickle at the base of her throat that choked her at unexpected intervals. She had, unwisely in hindsight, clamped down on the urge to make more of it. It had been so long since she'd been sick in the normal way. She had vague memories of being a small, miserable thing and a cool hand that brushed her hair back from her forehead. Ohtori would not have allowed for something as unpredictable as the common cold. It was proof of life, novel to a degree that almost made her sore throat worth it.

The woman at the hotel desk looked sorry for her in a way that was becoming familiar. It wasn't normal to appear to be a young girl traveling alone and from some people that earned her sympathy – which almost made her miss the scorn. "There's a kettle down the hall, dear," the woman said, almost reaching to pat her hand and then thinking better of it when Anthy coughed again. Anthy smiled – a placid approximation of gratitude.

She made herself a tea anyway. She was almost inconsolably thirsty now and she wondered if that was another thing that Ohtori had stolen from her. There were so many little things that were part of learning how to be human, it felt like she'd never catch up.

She woke in the night, hands flying to clutch at her chest as it spasmed through coughs that she couldn't seem to reign in enough to breathe. Chu-chu was a panicked noise at her side, almost inaudible over the blood rushing through her ears. She rose from her cot only to bend double over the floor as her ears rang and her chest heaved and relief remained too far from coming. And then she felt them – velvety soft, sliding over her tongue and across her lips. She stared at their nearly indiscernible shapes in the dark and a wave of horror rose within her. Her finger sought them out even though it wasn't necessary. She knew what roses smelled like.

She left the lights off as she scooped them up and flushed them down the toilet. She couldn't stand to know what colour they were.

* * *

Anthy dreamed of the road – endless, stretched, and yearning.

The road was not made to be walked; she felt the rough, uneven tread in her ankles as she made her way around bend after bend. But the jagged ledges of twisted metal and rock loomed threateningly at the edges of the road – dangerous and insurmountable. There was nowhere to go but forward. So she walked.

* * *

In the cold light of morning, Anthy pressed a hand against her sternum and breathed through her nose and found that the terror was not as sharp or inescapable. The room smelled of something indiscernible, but decidedly not floral and the events of the previous night took on the hazy, dream-like quality of an older memory. Anthy had never been comforted by the dawn of a new morning before, but, as with many things, Utena had changed her perspective. The promise of a new day felt like a second chance that she needed to make count. She could not be afraid of uncertainty – not anymore.

The same woman was waiting at the hotel desk, as if no time had passed. She hung Anthy's key back on the hook with almost unnecessary care. As Anthy coughed into her hand, the woman's eyes indiscreetly flicked from the key to a box of sanitary wipes to the place where Chu-chu had perched on Anthy's shoulder. It was hard to say what she thought, covering her discomfort with a smooth smile – it had been something of a disappointment to learn that that was a skill that still mattered here and not one of Ohtori's lies. "Only one night, young lady?" the woman said. "Are you meeting a friend?"

"Yes," Anthy said. "Soon, I hope."

"Oh, how nice." The woman seemed to mean that at least, eyes crinkled and bright.

"Yes. It really is." When Anthy left, she passed the petals from her hand to the garbage without looking at them.

* * *

Anthy was probably the only person at the fair who didn't want to be there. It was loud and crowded and powered by a dizzying, ritualistic enthusiasm. She felt underdressed amongst the bright colours in her modest pink dress, which had felt so fine when she'd first stepped past the gates of Ohtori. And there were the faces – all around her with eyes that didn't see her, but couldn't stop staring. She had been better, in a lot of ways, but too many unfamiliar faces still triggered a helpless, instinctual fear in her. She knew what kind of secrets someone's face could mask.

But underneath it all there was the hope. One day, among the unfamiliar faces, she might find a familiar one. The goal was in front of her – all she could do was walk toward it.

Chu-chu skittered back and forth across her shoulders, sniffing at the air with curiosity. Absently, she moved a hand to catch him when he nearly overbalanced, feeling off-kilter and captivated herself. There was a part of her that wanted to try this for real -to do something 'normal' and disconnected from everything she'd been before. Maybe part of it was a half-sick nostalgia for the girl that Utena had thought she was, even if every insistence that she just wanted to be a 'normal girl' had more to do with what Utena wanted to believe of herself than what Anthy was in truth. But maybe there was a part of her that pined curiously for herself. She was still learning what it meant to want something and to have it within possibility; there was an appeal to being 'normal' for a night.

The bright lights spun around her and people laughed and shrieked and were maybe less terrifying for being drawn to something larger and grander than her alone. She thought about buying some shaved ice for the sake of nostalgia. She bought a fluffy pink stick of cotton candy for the same reason; Chu-chu ate half of it.

She had, perhaps, let her guard down and was unexpectedly frightened when a hand grabbed her wrist. A woman smiled at her, apologetic and encouraging. And, underneath it, something hidden that smiled wider and made Anthy think of stars and dark roads and carousel horses. Predatory. "You look like a girl who wants to know the future."

Anthy smiled back, even if she felt stiff and cold with the force of it. "Do I? My, how unexpected." She tugged her wrist gently free and pulled away, forcing slow steps in arrythmia to her heart.

"Don't you want to know about the curse?" the woman called teasingly – maybe guessing, maybe mean. "It takes a prince to break these things, you know. True love's kiss."

Anthy stopped. Turned. "Oh, is that so? What a shame." She let the hidden thing within herself smile back. "There are no more princes. I've killed them all."

The woman didn't stop her again.

* * *

Anthy sometimes dared to look at the shapes that lined the road in her dreams. Wrecked cars, twisted until they almost looked like people, headlights glaring accusingly. They had spun themselves out around her – an obstacle that their chosen paths would have made a victim. It didn't make their stares any easier to bear.

To the east, the sun was rising.

* * *

Anthy found herself doing the impossible: she stopped, she settled, she existed in more than fleeting liminal space. Utena was out there and Anthy would find her – she believed that with all her heart and even the choking presence of rose petals scattered across her pillow in the dark of morning couldn't change that. But Anthy was learning the simple pleasure of seeing footsteps in places she had walked before. Of seeing grooves and pathways worn into familiar trails, welcoming her when she needed to walk them again. Of seeing the solid, undeniably real earth beneath her with her own mark upon it and knowing that each day she found a new way to say "I am here" and mean it.

Roses be damned.

She fixed up an old barn. It was hard work, but it was good work too. Solid and practical labour was a luxury that she had never been afforded. She wasn't very good at it at first; she kept losing the simple shapes inside spires and spirals and mistook wood for white stone. But eventually the shape of it came together in both her mind and reality. The barn became something to hold onto when everything else was lost and adrift.

She didn't garden, even if she missed it sometimes. She had enough to keep her hands busy.

She ventured into town rarely. The barn was a refuge from the strange, staring faces and it was hard not to hold to that comfort. When she did make the journey, she left a coughing trail of rose petals behind her like breadcrumbs. She didn't dare stop or look behind her to collect them and children sometimes followed them to her barn. They pounded on the door and laughed and scared each other with stories of the witch in the forest. Anthy listened to their antics, sat in a chair with a cup of tea and Chu-chu in her lap. She tried to imagine what it was like to be so young.

Each night, the road stretched before her. Sometimes, with the dark pressing in, she despaired of ever seeing the end of it. If she glanced behind her, she knew that she wouldn't be able to see the beginning anymore either.

* * *

The knock on the door was expected. The voice that followed it was not.

"Hello?" More knocking followed, as if Anthy could have somehow missed the first rendition. "Is anybody there?"

Anthy stood slowly, feeling a creak in her knees that she half expected to hear. Chu-chu slid off her lap, propelling down her skirt harmlessly with a noise of curious concern. She spared a moment to smile reassuringly at him, but her heartbeat pounded in rhythm with the knocking at the door.

"Hello? I, um, seem to have gotten myself lost."

Anthy pressed one hand against the door and let it take her weight – appreciating that it was solid, wishing that it wasn't. "You're awfully far from town, miss."

"Yeah." Anthy could picture her visitor awkwardly rubbing the back of her head, an endearingly childish gesture. "I got turned around, I guess. There were some flower petals on the trail – there was a wedding in town yesterday and I thought they might have been from that."

"You shouldn't follow strange trails in the woods or knock on strange houses. You could meet all sorts of dangerous people."

"You don't seem so bad." The visitor laughed, nervous, but not put off. "And I can't imagine anyone scary living in such a cute house."

Anthy eased open the door, slowly letting the light filter in. "What a naïve attitude." Her visitor watched her with wide blue eyes, unfazed by recognition. Even so, Anthy could not have pulled the smile from her face if she'd wanted to. "I've waited such a long time, Miss Utena."

* * *

Finding Utena had been the goal for so long that Anthy was at something of a loss as to what to do having reached it at last. Utena's lost memories were not a wholly unexpected hurdle, if still an inconvenient one. And she was not opposed to returning to visit the strange woman who knew her name. Over and over and over again, if that was what Anthy asked of her.

Anthy's greatest challenge, however, was entirely self-inflicted. She had, without meaning to, put down roots. In some ways, that felt more literal than figurative. She sometimes woke to itchy threads of green winding under her skin and she could hardly leave the house without blanketing the forest floor in a coughing shower of petals.

Figuratively and literally she had brought herself to a threshold that she did not know how to cross.

Utena visited again and again and Anthy treated her to tea while they talked about nothing. It felt a little like old times. If Anthy had to retire to cough in private with increasing and dangerous frequency, Utena could be relied on to comment tactlessly every time. It came from a good place, Anthy knew. Utena always clung to her sense of right and it brought out both the best and the worst in her. Once, Anthy had hated her for that – truly and deeply. Now it made a part of her thrum with want and adoration.

"You should let me paint you sometime," Anthy said, stirring her tea and enjoying the endearing flush of embarrassment that spread over Utena's cheeks. It was always hard to tell what reaction to expect. Utena said and did the most absurd things without apparent shame, censure, or instinct toward self-preservation, but an offhand remark or gesture could render her unexpectedly shy. It brought Anthy a thrill every time she managed to hit the right trigger. She had missed Utena for so long and yet everything felt brand new and undiscovered.

"Why?"

"Because you're beautiful," Anthy said honestly. And she surely knew it – must have been told it before even if she didn't remember the names and faces of those that Anthy knew had thought it, but still her fingers fluttered to her face in bashful speechlessness. Anthy laughed in spite of herself. She was doing a lot more of that with Utena around.

The laughing turned, perhaps predictably, to coughing. It took her by surprise, her shoulders hunching against the force as she fought for control of her own body. She pressed her hands tight over her mouth, praying and hoping and begging for _please, not now, just please_. Through burning eyes, she could see Utena half-stand, hovering over the surface of her chair with horror and concern.

One petal escaped Anthy's grasp. Just one. Harmless and fluttering, drifting gently to rest against the surface tension of Utena's half-finished tea. Anthy, unwilling, saw that the petal was white. Something worse than illness made her tremble as her mind helplessly spun around what that might mean.

Utena stared down at the petal in something like shock, almost falling back into her chair as she observed it. Her face eased into something thoughtful, eyes glancing at Anthy. And then, before Anthy could do more than offer a wordless cry of warning, she drank from the cup. The petal brushed innocently against Utena's lip. Anthy wondered if this was the fulfillment of a promise made by silly, scared little girls; the tea had been poisoned after all. She had ruined a perfect thing.

And then Utena set the cup down and smiled. A different smile. One Anthy's memory linked with unexpected invitations and the word 'home'. "I'm so glad that we could finally meet, Himemiya."

It was almost nostalgic how immediately Anthy felt herself overwhelmed. Utena had a frustrating knack for tearing down walls before Anthy could shore them, driven by ruthless innocence. It was maddening not to be able to predict someone so simple. And so Anthy was crying – all at once, ugly and inconsolable. It wasn't that bad because Utena was crying too. And then, seemingly without crossing the distance of the table, Utena was holding her and that was even better.

"I don't have any cookies," Anthy said.

With the buzzing tingle of Utena's laughter against her lips, Anthy was able to breathe at last.


End file.
